The Words We Heard as Horrors Sank In

Kenneth Goldsmith is a conceptual poet, a literary trickster whose books are found art of a sort. He mines the mundane.

One of his volumes, “Soliloquy” (2001), consists of every word he spoke for a week. Another, “The Weather” (2005), compiled a year’s worth of weather bulletins from 1010 WINS, the all-news radio station in New York. Yet another, “Day” (2003), is a faithful transcription of each sentence printed in The New York Times on Sept. 1, 2000.

Mr. Goldsmith, who refers to his writing as “mimetic and uncreative,” recently became the first poet laureate appointed by the Museum of Modern Art. There’s a good deal of Andy Warhol in his deadpan attack. His stuff has often been more rewarding to think about than to read.

His potent new book, “Seven American Deaths and Disasters,” takes its title from a series of Warhol paintings. It’s made up entirely of other people’s words, and in many senses it’s like everything he’s done. Yet it’s like nothing he’s done. It knocks the air from your lungs.

To make “Seven American Deaths and Disasters,” Mr. Goldsmith has combed through archival radio and television broadcasts of painful events over the past six decades: there are chapters about the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and John Lennon; the explosion aboard the space shuttle Challenger; the shootings at Columbine High School; the attacks at the World Trade Center; and the death of Michael Jackson — and he has transcribed the reports as they unfurled on the air, live and unmediated.

To Mr. Goldsmith’s detractors this may seem like a cheap stunt, a snort of disaster porn. Or it may seem like proof that, in the author’s case, even a blind and snoutless pig will occasionally find a truffle. At times it made me uneasy.

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CreditWilliam P. O'Donnell/The New York Times

But Mr. Goldsmith has also delivered a kind of found treasure of the American vernacular. His book is about the sounds our culture makes when the reassuring smooth jazz of much of our broadcast media breaks down, when disc jockeys and news anchors are forced to find words for events that are nearly impossible to describe. This book is about language under duress.

In his chapter about President Kennedy’s assassination, Mr. Goldsmith tunes in to KLIF, a radio station in Dallas. Ads for Armour Star broad-breasted turkeys (Thanksgiving was approaching) and Falstaff beer segue into “I Have a Boyfriend,” a hit by the Chiffons. He prints the lyrics:

(Boom-sh-boom)

(Boom-sh-boom)

He made a promise

(Boom)

(Whoo-eee-whoo)

He’ll never make me cry

(Boom-sh-boom)

Every time we kiss good night

Feels so good to hold him tight ...

Then an announcer cuts in: “This is a KLIF bulletin from Dallas. Three shots reportedly were fired at the motorcade of President Kennedy today near the downtown section. KLIF news is checking out the report. We will have further reports. Stay tuned.”

The station cuts back to “I Have a Boyfriend.” It broadcasts advertisements for pimple cream and a Sandra Dee movie, and plays Tommy Roe’s song “Everybody” before switching over to cover the breaking news.

This tight focus on one station (Mr. Goldsmith edits these transcripts) allows odd details to shine. “A special carton of blood, apparently for transfusion purposes, has been rushed into the emergency ward,” a KLIF announcer reports. “Two Dallas police officers carried that carton.”

Above all, there’s a dignity in these announcers’ attempts to hold back, to wait for authoritative news. When one of them speaks of a “deadly veil of bullets,” he stops himself : “We said deadly. That word was ill advised. We will correct that.” The station waits for the official announcement to arrive.

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Kenneth Goldsmith

A “Monday Night Football” game was in progress, with Howard Cosell in the booth, when word of John Lennon’s death arrived. “Remember this is just a football game, no matter who wins or loses,” Mr. Cosell says. “An unspeakable tragedy confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City. John Lennon outside of his apartment building on the West Side in New York City, the most famous perhaps of all of the Beatles, shot twice in the back, rushed to Roosevelt Hospital, dead on arrival.”

In the immediate aftermath of the Challenger explosion, two reporters can’t help reflecting on what it was like to listen to NASA’s broadcast of the event. We read: “Chris, as you know, the voice of NASA, the voice of Mission Control, whatever voice we hear, is always calm. But ... today, of course, we hear a different note of terrible ...”

Another voice comes in: “Well it’s a ... it’s a steely tone, I think, one that is, you know, a forced calm, the way you get when you are faced with an intensely emotional and tragic situation and try very hard to cover it.”

The hardest chapters to read in “Seven American Deaths and Disasters” are those about Columbine and the World Trade Center attacks, because both were still happening during the reports transcribed here. There is a disquieting sense of lives being lost in real time.

This book will have you dilating on race in America. After Robert Kennedy’s death, there were incorrect reports that the assassin was a black man. Michael Jackson’s career is mocked by D.J.’s even before confirmation of his death has arrived: “Jeff. Jeff. There are still people who want to sound like Elvis! There’s nobody who wants to sound like Michael Jackson.”

Mr. Goldsmith’s book is a kind of atrocity exhibition, also a little black book of heartbreak. Sometimes his editing skills fail him. Several of these sections go on too long and become repetitive. At other times he shears these reports of too much of the day’s context, of things like the pop songs that eerily framed the news of President Kennedy’s shooting. He repeatedly misspells the name of Gov. John B. Connally Jr. of Texas.

But mostly he is an adept literary magpie. He concludes his section on Sept. 11 with morning news from Chinatown, news that somehow captures this book’s horrific yet eerily quotidian tone.

As the world sits in smoking rubble a few blocks away, a reporter says: “They’re shopping, they’re ... they’re ... they’re buying their fish. Uh, it’s ... it’s as if this little corner of New York City was totally unaffected, but you know it’s at the top of their minds. They’re talking about it. They’re pointing up in the air periodically and they’re continuing with their card games. So it’s, uh, just a little snapshot of, uh, a piece of New York as they deal with this immense tragedy.”

SEVEN AMERICAN DEATHS AND DISASTERS

By Kenneth Goldsmith

176 pages. powerHouse Books. $19.95.

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